Drawing upon decades of experience, RAND provides research services, systematic analysis, and innovative thinking to a global clientele that includes government agencies, foundations, and private-sector firms.

The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

What We Do

This book provides a scientific and personal perspective on health services research over the last half-century. Its essays and commentaries suggest how this science base can stimulate innovative thinking about ways to make health care systems safer, more efficient, more cost-effective, and more patient-centered.

Approximately 70 percent of unaccompanied homeless youth are current smokers, and their attempts/desire to quit is often considered to be a low priority. However, many are motivated to quit and are interested in smoking cessation products and services.

Economic reasoning took center stage in the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday to uphold the legality of the Affordable Care Act's subsidies in all states. The subsidies are critical to ensuring that healthy people, with lower health care costs, have adequate incentive to enroll.

The Affordable Care Act has helped millions of Americans gain access to health insurance. Many have never been insured. What do they need to connect to the health system and remain engaged with their care?

Elders may delegate control and share personal health information with family, but they want to retain control of the information as long as possible. When developing patient portals to health information, health systems need to consider the privacy and autonomy of elderly patients.

What We Focus on

We address the topics that matter most in the health policy debate.

Implementing the Affordable Care Act

Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been marked by controversy and unexpected twists, including court challenges, the initial rollout fiasco, and delays in key provisions. RAND experts have examined the impact of these developments and the law’s provisions on coverage, costs, and health. Underpinning much of this work is the COMPARE microsimulation model, which allows RAND experts to produce timely assessments of the law’s components and proposed alternatives.

Paying for Care

Over the last four decades, both the public and private sectors have experimented with payment approaches designed to motivate providers to deliver better care at lower cost. Since the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, we have led the way in efforts to understand the links between physician payment, quality of care, and system cost.

Organizing Care

How individuals access and experience care depends on more than health insurance. At the most basic level are questions about who provides care and how new care arrangements can make care more accessible, more efficient, and less costly. RAND Health is evaluating multiple experiments with these new arrangements to learn how well they perform and what might improve them.

Quality of Care

The U.S. health care system struggles to deliver care that is likely to improve health and is consistent with current medical science. Improving care is a long-term, complex challenge, and we have confronted this challenge by helping to establish the scientific basis for defining and measuring quality of care.

Healthy Populations and Communities

Good health depends on more than health care. Health behaviors and the social and physical environment exert strong influences on population health. RAND Health has examined many of these influences, addressing difficult questions such as how cigarette and alcohol ads influence behavior, if workplace wellness programs work, and why obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. and around the world.

Codirector, RAND Drug Policy Research Center

What we don't know (but we are currently studying) is whether improving neighborhood conditions in a socio-economically distressed urban community can increase feelings of safety and security, leading to more restful sleep.

Behavioral & Social Scientist

Those caregivers who are helping individuals (post-9/11 veterans) with behavioral health issues are at increased risk for depression ... caregiving not only poses an economic burden but poses a health burden to the caregivers themselves.

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The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.